Only 03 - Only You

chances of concealment, whether for him or for the men who pursued him.
    Yet since dawn Reno had seen nothing move over the face of the land but cloud shadows, and very few of those.
    “Looks like Slater’s horses finally gave up,” Eve said, staring out over their back trail.
    Reno made a sound that could have meant anything.
    “Does that mean we can camp early?” Eve asked hopefully.
    He looked at her and smiled.
    “Depends,” he said.
    “On what?”
    “On whether that spring Cal’s daddy marked is still flowing. If it is, we’ll fill up the canteens and make camp a few miles away.”
    “Miles?” Eve said, hoping she had heard wrong.
    “Miles. In dry land, only a fool or an army camps next to water.”
    She thought about it and sighed.
    “I see,” Eve said unhappily. “Camping by water would be like camping in the center of a crossroads.”
    Reno nodded.
    “How far is the spring?” she asked.
    “A few hours.”
    When Eve was silent, Reno glanced aside at her. Despite the hard miles on the trail, she looked goodto him. The shine of her hair was undiminished, her color was high, and the quickness of her mind hadn’t changed.
    Even more pleasing to Reno, Eve shared his fascination with the austere land. Her questions showed it, as did her long silences while she studied the layers of stone he pointed out, trying to imagine the forces that had built them.
    “How big is the spring?” she asked.
    “What did you have in mind?”
    “A bath.”
    The thought of getting Eve naked in a pool of water had a rapid, pronounced effect on Reno’s body. With a silent curse he forced his thoughts away from the memory of her nipples drawn taut and shiny from the searching caresses of his mouth.
    Reno tried very hard not to think about Eve in that way at all. It was too damned distracting. He was a man of unusual self-control, yet he had very nearly reached for her at dawn that morning, and to hell with worrying about the outlaws on their trail.
    “You might get a basin bath out of the spring,” he said evenly.
    The purring sound of pleasure Eve made did nothing to decrease Reno’s sensual awareness of her.
    “Is it at the end of this valley?” Eve asked.
    “This isn’t a valley. It’s the top of a mesa.”
    She looked at Reno, then at their back trail.
    “Looks like a valley to me,” she said.
    “Only if you come at it from this direction,” he said. “You come at it from the desert, you have no doubt. It’s like climbing up onto a big, broad step, then another and then another until you come to foothills and then real mountains.”
    Eve closed her eyes, recalling the maps from the journals, thinking of how different the land had looked to her than it had to the Spanish, who often were approaching from a different direction than she and Reno took.
    “That’s why they called it Mesa Verde,” she said suddenly.
    “What?”
    “The Spanish. They first saw the mesa when they were in the desert. And compared to the desert, the mesa was as green as grass.”
    Reno took off his hat, resettled it, and looked over at Eve with a smile.
    “That’s been bothering you for days, hasn’t it?” he asked.
    “Not anymore,” she said with satisfaction.
    “The Spanish might have been fools for gold, but they weren’t crazy. What something looks like depends on how you come at it, that’s all.”
    “Even red dresses?” Eve asked.
    The instant the words left her mouth, Eve regretted them.
    “You just never give up, do you?” Reno asked coolly. “Well, I’ve got bad news for you. Neither do I.”
    For a long time after that, nothing broke the silence but the sound of hooves striking the ground in a rhythm so familiar, it was like a heartbeat, unnoticed unless it changed suddenly.
    The valley that wasn’t really a valley began to descend with increasing steepness. As it slanted down to the stone maze, the land changed, rising slowly on either side of the dry wash Reno had chosen to follow.
    The wash was lined with stunted cottonwoods whose leaves were a dusty green that gave shade but little coolness. Plants that required surfacewater to survive had long since flowered, gone to seed, and died back to brittle stalks that rustled with every breeze, waiting for the seasonal rains to come.
    The farther the wash went to the west and north, the higher the walls on either side became, and the more narrow the passage between. After a time, Reno slipped the thong that held his six-gun in the holster and